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After some
initial Linux troubles, last month we finally got Intel
Sandy Bridge graphics working under Linux. The latest Intel CPUs (such as the Core i5 2500K) with integrated
graphics are blazingly fast, and the classic Intel Mesa driver was fast compared
to other open-source Mesa / Gallium3D drivers, but it still was a ways behind
the low-end discrete graphics cards with the proprietary AMD / NVIDIA drivers
for Linux. It was also shown that the
Intel Linux Mesa driver is much slower than the Intel Windows driver for Sandy
Bridge, as we had also found was the case for previous generations of Intel graphics.
Committed to the Mesa mainline Git repository this week though was a very important
Sandy Bridge change. While the commit only touched 13 lines of code (11 lines
of new code, 2 lines of changed code), it has dramatically improved the Sandy
Bridge Linux performance as our results show in this article.

It
is this Git commit from the 1st of March by Intel's Zou Nan hai that we are
talking about. For Sandy Bridge / "Gen 6" Intel hardware, it bumps the
VS thread count to 60. It is a relatively straightforward and simple patch, but
how it affects the OpenGL performance is dramatic.

In this article are the original Phoronix test results for the
Intel Core i5 2500K "Sandy Bridge" from early February using the Intel
Bearup Lake motherboard (the show-stopping problem with the ASUS motherboard remains
unresolved) plus the already-published Windows 7 Professional x64 Service Pack
1 results. What is new are the updated Intel numbers. On a clean install of Ubuntu
10.10 to the same Sandy Bridge system, the latest Linux 2.6.38 kernel was loaded
(2010-03-02; Linux 2.6.38-rc7) plus the latest xf86-video-intel DDX from Git on
2010-03-02 (xf86-video-intel 2.14.901), the latest Git libdrm, and then Mesa from
Git master on 2010-03-02 marked as Mesa 7.11-devel.

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